In Search of Work

1. Where Have All the Workers
Gone?

The recent San Francisco BART strike demonstrated
something I have suspected for a long time --- that
Americans of the late 1990s bring to the concept of work a very different
understanding from those of earlier generations. During countless interviews
repeated endlessly by the media, Bay Area residents departed from traditional
expressions of support for, or opposition to, the strikers; they framed
their responses in terms suggesting that they were seeing work, and the
people who do it, in new ways. Or so it seemed to me. But perhaps, in the
absence of major local labor news, I had simply forgotten.

In search of confirmation ---
and explanations --- I turned to my library's stash
of old magazines and made a quick tour of those long-time purveyors of
American values Time, Newsweek, and Life. In an attempt to
impose some sort of structure on an admittedly unsystematic project, I
traveled in ten-year leaps, beginning in 1947, through the mid-September
issues. Looking at popular publications may not be the most accurate way
of determining what the public was thinking. But I reasoned that, even
if readers only partially shared the opinions expressed, their attitudes
must have been affected by what they saw and read there.

My explorations turned out to be far more
than a simple exercise in nostalgia. We've come a long way, baby.

The news magazines of 1947 overflow with images
of a nation at work, an energetic nation, newly emerged from an economic
depression and a world war and feeling its way to recovery. Despite Congress's
recent passage of the oppressive Taft-Hartley Act over Truman's veto, labor
was organizing to ensure that workers would participate in the incipient
postwar prosperity. Not everyone approved of these efforts: W. L. Geffeney,
of Del Mar, California, wrote to Newsweek, "Let's hope that [a photograph
of scabs marching determinedly toward a picket line] is the spirit of '47."
But the news stories --- a new labor-friendly president
of the Toledo, Peoria and Western Railroad; an injunction to prevent the
Atlantic Fishermen's Union from controlling the price of fish; the appointment
of Cyrus S. Ching (formerly a motorman and subsequently a corporate industrial
relations lawyer) as head of the new Federal Mediation and Conciliation
Service --- make it clear that union activities were
significant parts of American life.

More astonishing from a 1990s perspective, however,
is the advertisements. Everywhere, people are at work. In the 1940s both
Life and Time carried ads for work clothes. There are photographs of grimy
miners and paunchy men in coveralls, standing at assembly lines. (People
of color are almost completely absent, but a few female factory workers
make a neatly dressed appearance, surprising in an era when women were
being politely escorted back to the kitchen.) No matter what the setting,
if it is outside the home (and most are), workers are present: a motorist
at a service station consults a wrench-wielding mechanic; a family on a
country picnic encounters an overalled farmer; a couple in a restaurant
discuss the menu with a chef.

Ten years later, the nation's eyes were riveted
on Central High School in Little Rock, where a morality play starring Governor
Orville Faubus and nine black teenagers was being enacted. The economy
was racing ahead. Newsweek announced proudly that more Americans were working
than ever before, and fears of inflation replaced worries about economic
recovery. Already tarred by intimations of Communist links, the reputation
of organized labor sank still further in September 1957 when the AFL-CIO
conducted an investigation into Teamster corruption under Dave Beck and
Jimmy Hoffa père. Nevertheless, aside from Life, which
devoted its commercial space exclusively to families in the privacy of
their own latest-model home, the magazines' advertisements continued to
portray a world where everyday life is conducted in a community of people
working at a wide variety of jobs.

Not so in 1967. Vietnam had divided the country,
and not even Madison Avenue dared to propose a stroll down the war-torn
streets of Our Town. Salt-of-the-earth workers ---
except for a few indispensable pumpers of gas ---
disappeared from the ads. In news stories they became the bad guys in a
new morality play where Walter Reuther went head to head (all at once ---
no mean feat) against the "nonchalant" CEOs of the Big 3 car companies.
Image making was blatant: a photograph of smiling, relaxed strikers is
captioned, "Pickets: An Ominous Look." Newsweek even dredged up
91-year-old former federal mediator Cyrus Ching, who reminisced about the
good old days of labor relations when tough bargainers like Harry Bridges
and John L. Lewis ran the movement. Viewing the UAW strike, one "veteran
observer" noted that affluence made for arrogance on both sides. What he
saw as arrogance was the auto workers' demand for a guaranteed wage in
a society where affluence was increasingly punctured by pockets of poverty.

Ten years later, labor news focused monotonously
on growing unemployment rates, with human-interest descriptions of plant
closings and proposals by "liberals" for a two-tiered minimum wage to alleviate
joblessness among teenagers. An advertisement featuring a photograph of
crash-test dummies tells the story best: real people doing real work have
eerily disappeared from the magazines. They have been replaced by icons,
emblems of a long-gone halcyon time when visions of communities were given
shape by the workers in them. Thus, a group of people, each in a different
type of work clothes (somewhat like pictures of people in native garb,
promoting the idea of international harmony), each holding a black plastic
garbage bag. The caption reads, "We all recycle."

In September 1987 another UAW strike caught the
attention of the news magazines, if only because it showed how weak organized
labor had become. In the face of foreign competition, the union ---
which had lost 400,000 members in the previous eight years ---
sought job security, not wage increases. But workers, especially white
males, had become important to the popular imagination as symbols of American
values. A Time article entitled "For Sale: America" illustrated
its theme with a picture of a white worker talking earnestly with his Japanese
supervisor. A Newsweek article charting the GOP pursuit of Southern
voters found suitable examples in a "threader in a textile plant" who thanked
the Republican Party for his prosperity and a "maintenance worker" to whom
"conservative" meant "taking care of your own first: your wife and kids,
your own people, own country." Thereafter, if the magazines showed people
actually working, you could assume that they lived overseas, probably in
a third world country. America, the technological superstar, seemed to
be run out of clean gray offices where work consisted of pushing a few
intelligently programmed buttons.

2. Work Is in the Eye of the
Beholder

A person walking down the street today, as in 1947, is surrounded by people
working: carpenters and painters, repaving crews, truck drivers, shopkeepers
--- all making the world go round, as they have for
centuries. Nor has organized labor retired. In addition to the recent well-publicized
UPS and BART strikes, a number of unions are engaged in dramatic if unreported
battles. Some are local and short-lived; some rival the epic strikes of
the past:

On Monday, September 8, U.S. and Canadian dockworkers shut down all shipping
on the West Coast for eight hours. The North American members of the International
Longshore and Warehouse Union were acting with their counterparts all over
the world to show their support for the longshoremen of Liverpool, who
have been locked out of their jobs for 23 months for refusing to cross
a picket line. One of the fired workers, international coordinator Terry
Teague, described the English port as "a symbol for all dockers who are
determined to resist the threats of casual labour, mass sackings, and the
deregulation of our industry." The Mersey Docks and Harbour Co. has hired
replacement non-union workers to load and unload cargo.

Members of the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions walked off their
jobs at the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press in July 1995 and have
remained locked out ever since. Administrative Law Judge Thomas R. Wilkes
ruled that the papers' publishers, Gannett Knight Ridder, brought about
the strike by its unfair labor practices, including attempts to unilaterally
change employees' job assignments and pay rates, and to replace union workers
with independent contractors. Nevertheless, on August 14, 1995, U.S. District
Court Judge John Corbett O'Meara denied the union's request for an injunction
that would allow its members to return to work. For the past 26 months,
replacement workers and management have put out the newspapers.

Workers at a sulphuric acid plant in Copperhill, Tennessee, have been locked
out for the past 16 months after they protested against the company's attempts
to unilaterally change employees' job assignments and pay rates. (As an
example, local union leader J. M. [Mack] York noted, "They wanted the right
to order a boilermaker to drive a crane for the day" and pay him accordingly.)
The owner, the Sweden-based multinational Trelleborg Group, preferred selling
to settling, but so far no prospective buyer has been willing to clean
up both the labor mess and the environmental damage (sulphuric acid seepage
into nearby groundwater and soil) that would accompany the purchase.

In another time and place, actions like these would have provided heroic
material for storytellers. But in an age when workers are invisible, they
have become irrelevant. The removal of workers from the popular consciousness,
in a kind of spiritual genocide, has made it possible to attach new conceptions
of work to the social landscape. New wine, very sour indeed, has been poured
into ancient bottles; there it sits, not aging into something fine but
turning into vinegar. As the years pass, we may even forget what good wine
tasted like.

The new conceptions of work are strange indeed, as comments during the
BART strike make clear. The first thing to be discarded was the idea of
work for subsistence: the support of self and family by directly producing
what is needed or by earning the money to buy it. In the new scheme of
things, work --- now usually defined as a job, or
work in the employ of other people --- has become
a moral value. No matter that a woman inhabiting the idealized land of
Single Welfare Motherhood must work hard, day after day, to navigate an
ever-changing tangle of support services and provide food, shelter, and
nurturance for her families. She has, as Phil Gramm announced, a responsibility
to "get out of the wagon and help the rest of us pull." It is likely that
she won't be able to support her family on the job she finds. "The person
at the car rental agency where I rented the car told me they make $6 an
hour and are glad to have jobs" (Robert Wilkinson, Berkeley). But because
jobs have only moral value and no intrinsic worth, they are interchangeable.
"These days (like it or not) that if you want a meaningful increase in
salary, you have to change jobs" (Michael Heine, San Francisco). In fact,
because jobs have only moral value and no intrinsic worth, compensation
is meaningless. "I'll bet there are thousands of people who would jump
through hoops for a $40,000 non-degree job even with the so-called unbearable
conditions the current employees are moaning about" (Tanya Taylor, Oakland).
Not to worry: "$250 [for a jacket] falls within the budget of most working
women" (Suzy Baxter McAllister, Sausalito).

Once work becomes a moral value, there is no room for the idea that
employers and employees have different interests. Work becomes a vocation,
which workers cling to with all the devotion of converts. The primary reason
for public ill will during the BART strike was that the shutdown kept people
from their work. "I am a state employee. We have had no wage increases
for three years. Yet we are not punishing the people" (Ben McClinton, Kensington).
Practices that arose in Japan --- the company-as-community
and team decision-making --- have been eagerly sucked
up by the new vacuum in the American concept of work. Workplaces of the
future, so graphically captured in PBS's "Excellence Files," aim to "create
an environment where the whole human being can participate"; the key to
success is devising ways to "get employees to give their all to the company."
Employer and employee merge. Small wonder that complaints during the BART
strike often rendered workers and management indistinguishable. "They had
a pay increase in April and then they raised the fares" (Tom Schoensee,
Daly City). The timing of the fusion is fortuitous, and perhaps not accidental,
for companies that leap national boundaries require employees who are devoted
to them and not to class or locality. Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo
called it: "As a matter of principle, labor and environmental worries must
not be allowed to be used as instruments to affect free trade in the world."

These converts to the New Work Ethic remind me of the Spanish priests
who descended on California some 200 years ago, bringing enlightenment
to the Indians living here. Appalled at what they perceived as a laxity
of indigenous morals, they resorted to harsh measures to bring their new
charges to the Truth. It is easy to wonder if their faith was shaken at
times by the evidence they saw of different power structures and other
successful ways of living and if, in the face of temptation to abandon
hair shirts and flagellation for an easier relationship with the universe,
they clung even more tightly to the ways of the church of Rome. The church
of the global economy rests not on the rock of human labor but on the sand
of speculation. How much more likely that its priests would begin to doubt
its efficacy and lash out at those who offered an alternative.